Category: compact disc

The crowd is hushed. Wobbling guitars tilt and bend, plucking gilded strings with fingerfuls of dripping ambrosia. Wry, reverberating vocals fill the creases of every corner with winking warmth. Honeyed tones are anchored by dry, rattling snare hits and descending bass notes falling like footsteps on a staircase.

A conjurer enters the room. She is followed closely by a thousand men whose unhinged hopes rattle like the tin cans of freshly-bred honeymooners.

Her eyes soften into a false focus and melt in twin cerulean drips. She will not complete you. She will not fulfill her promises. She can only walk in a circle, clutching a broken flaxen strand, an ouroboros gnawing on its own smile.

“Quiet”. Woolgathering as soft steps struggle to stomach the circuitous decay underfoot. A quiet that doubles as both hum and rattle; tectonic yet remote. Reticence that builds upon itself as so many hours upon the day. This is time lapse caught in situ; the stillness has found mood-form in the vibrance of a tamed chaos. Where the halcyon subsides, we are trapped at the point of denoument and the twirling precipice of soundless collapse. In these faults we find effulgent absence; in absentia we find pieces abridged.

Physically resembling a Hackers vision of frozen horse surreality, Peace Country wayfarer Alex Linfield’s latest vaporized totem delves through playful post-punk hypnosis, bedroom polyrhythms and fretless wormholes. There’s a computerized sodality here, futuristically swirling with the punks and weirdos too cool for disco, but who still want to twinge and tweak on the dance floor. It’s an interpretation geographically removed that maybe we start to wonder what “back in the day” actually means to people now. Do we appreciate and replicate, or do we make it our own?

There are no straight edges on Jupiter. Rhythm is broken into curving arabesques, resonating concentric circles into the cosmic void. Singular sounds interact over fluid ostinatoes – receding into background radiation in a prepared experiment. The instrument is bent into the music, layered and moulded through physical and ethereal alteration. The listener ascends into a frenzy of interplanetary messages emanating from a distance.

Stilted hush and blurry breeze sweep across corrugated timber, the voice of the moon in the night sky. Fulgent pop-gazery housed in the open-hearted diaphragms that spread like mountains over the streets brought to life by the night sky’s freckled mien. The silent spread of light bleeding from tears in the fabric overhead; these timbre colours of Twin Voices hold the sepulchral deep dark of night at bay, reclaiming from the stitched weight of night the opulent glimmer of beating hearts scattered amongst the herbage of dry bones and black holes.

From the naturally magnetic mind of Matthew Blenkarn: Strap a magnet to a man and see what he draws in. Will his currents strike the earth’s natural fields, ringing out like a climactic shot from a Spaghetti western? Or will the attraction be more subtle and fleeting, like wafting mist over a lake? If he interacts with electromagnets, will the alternating currents shimmer like a mirage? What’s certain is that the sound will pull you through landscapes and waterways, seeking out its source.

The harmonic steppenwolves howl back at the moon with an OST for this grindhouse of burners filmed in the backwoods and blacktops of Saskatchewan. Previous riff-razing liftoffs sprawled out as vast as the prairie sky, yet these instrumental mood-setters swell and spark out in the length of a lycanthropic attack. In the calm before the bloodbath, there’s nothing to do but clap for the wolfman.

The walls are heaving with a façade of damp-lidded eyes – swollen and trembling – pale green as honeydew melons. They are blinking slowly and sharing light, passing spoonfuls back towards you.

You comb through their bottlebrush lashes with your fingers. The webbing of your fingers gums up with a thick tar, like the guts of a cigarette stuffed in the back of your throat to avoid a conversation with a stranger.

Your left foot sinks into a prison cake of wet cement. Your right foot is rimmed by dense puddles of collapsed wormholes. If you lean in too closely, you might hear yourself moaning.

Friends pass like whispered winds in the night, singing of the experimental electro-pop caught in their spines, coursing through their backs like so many wraith-like downbeats that cut across the padded divides of static lo-fidelities. These songs have been captured in bare palms, upturned to dry theirdiaphoretic faces in the warm glow of the ebbing particles that rain down from the ceilings above. Waning lullabies for static hearts; copper wire conduits connecting anodic pitter-patters to the rubber soles that walk across electrified prairie plains.